Saving less than a minute of our daily commute costs Americans $22 million a day
By Mary Randolph edited by Andrea Thompson
James Osmond/Getty Images
By adding just one minute to their daily drive travelAmerican drivers could save more than $20 million and avoid nearly 60,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions every day, according to a new study.
The fact that speed increases fuel consumption is not new, says study co-author Will Northropprofessor of mechanical engineering at the University of Minnesota. As a car accelerates, the resistance of the air pushing it increases and forces the engine to work harder, using more fuel to achieve the same speed. But we didn’t provide numbers for that, and that’s where the Northrop team and a data set on the trajectories of American cars come in.
“What’s unique about our work and what motivated us is that we had a very large data set, which allowed us to really understand the real impact of vehicle trajectories and speed on fuel economy,” he says.
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The team used a set of raw data collected from automakers that tracked the locations and speeds of cars across the country every three seconds on four separate days at different times of the year. From there, researchers mapped locations based on speed limits and studied vehicle trajectories; they anonymized the specific GPS coordinates after performing the speed calculations.
Out of 120 million trips, 43.2% involved speeding. Use a supercomputerthe Northrop team modeled a hypothetical version of each trip without speeding — a daunting data processing task that took years.
When the authors extrapolated their results to an entire year of driving, they estimated that by giving up speeding, drivers would have saved $22 million per day, based on 2021 gasoline prices. In a recent analysis adjusted for Gas prices 2026the daily cost amounted to $26 million.
Although the study, published Thursday in Communications sustainabilityhighlights “the magnitude of day-to-day savings,” Northrop says, other research questions remain. His team is curious about the fuel effects of acceleration and aggressive driving as well as other air pollutants that might increase with speed. This study also doesn’t take into account real-world circumstances related to speeding, such as traffic patterns, he adds, which can make it harder to quit the habit completely.
“We don’t have a social solution; we’re engineers,” Northrop says. “We’re putting the data out there so people know it’s the cause of the speed.”
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